All hail James Grant
If you didn't catch James Grant's piece in the Sunday New York Times, do yourself a favor and catch it now. Best part (among many):
What could account for the weakness of our credit markets? Why does the Fed feel the need to intervene at the drop of a market? The reasons have to do with an idea set firmly in place in the 1930s and expanded at every crisis up to the present. This is the notion that, while the risks inherent in the business of lending and borrowing should be finally borne by the public, the profits of that line of work should mainly accrue to the lenders and borrowers.
It has not been lost on our Wall Street titans that the government is the reliable first responder to scenes of financial distress, or that there will always be enough paper dollars to go around to assist the very largest financial institutions. In the aftermath of the failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the genius-directed hedge fund that came a cropper in 1998, the Fed — under Alan Greenspan — delivered three quick reductions in the federal funds rate. Thus fortified, lenders and borrowers, speculators and investors, resumed their manic buying of technology stocks. That bubble burst in March 2000.
Understandably, it’s only the selling kind of panic to which the government dispatches its rescue apparatus. Few object to riots on the upside. But bull markets, too, go to extremes. People get carried away, prices go too high and economic resources go where they shouldn’t. Bear markets are nature’s way of returning to the rule of reason.
It's a shame I should even have to recommend this article. It shouldn't be such a rarity. But such is the state of the establishment media in 2007.
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